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Humans were problem for Discovery Channel attacker

Al Gore acolyte James J. Lee managed to get himself offed by a police sharpshooter after taking over the Discovery Communications headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., on Wednesday.

No word on whether the sharpshooter used EPA-approved ammunition in the job, not that it should matter. In some quarters, though, such issues weigh heavily. Wouldn’t want the lethal projectile to harm the environment, after all.

Lee, it turns out, might be one who would have wished to be ushered into the Great Beyond with the help of an environmentally friendly projectile, perhaps a naturally occurring element, just not lead or anything.

After all, Lee believed humans and their works are ruining the planet.

Lee’s whole reason for taking over the building occupied by Discovery Communications was to coerce the company into airing television programming that Lee would approve.

Specifically, Lee wanted Discovery to air programs that would show humans how unnecessary, even harmful, they are to the Earth.

According to his website, savetheplanetprotest.com, the kind of programming Lee wanted to see would make even Goebbels blush.

“Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution,” Lee wrote.

“A game-show format contest would be in order,” Lee suggested. “Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation.”

Malthus was the originator, in 1798, of the idea of human overpopulation leading to massive starvation. He has yet to be right.

Darwin, a half-century after Malthus, wrote “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”

We know what he meant by “favoured races,” but only a few of us recognize it.

Not content to despise children, Lee was flat irritated by just about everything.

“Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is,” he wrote. “That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn’t, then get the hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??”

Take away the invective — though not all of it — and James J. Lee is no different than Darwin, Malthus or Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb,” which told us back in 1968 that we all would die by, well a decade or so ago.

That would be just fine by Lee, who wanted Discovery Communications to adopt his worldview: “Saving the environment and the remaining species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.”

That the species able to use its opposable thumbs to manipulate the remote to the Discovery Channel would no longer be around was evidently not something that occurred to Lee as the infant in the ointment of his brilliant plans.

Lee was wearing homemade bombs evidently patterned after the suicide vests whose employment in the Middle East is doing so much to bring about the human-free world he yearned for.

Back in 2008, Lee underwent an an “awakening” on viewing former Vice President Al Gore’s environmental shlockumentary ‘‘An Inconvenient Truth.”

Had Lee taken down a few dozen of his fellow humans, wouldn’t Gore stand guilty as a co-conspirator? Maybe even the mastermind?

No. Gore was, after all, merely exercising his right to free speech.

Speech tells us much about the speaker and in the case of James J. Lee, his speech is just as self-illustrative.

What is striking about Lee is not that he has strayed from the shining path of true-believer environmentalism, but that he illustrates so clearly how shriekingly confused it is.